amity shlaes is director for the 4% project at the george w. bush institute and author of the forthcoming "coolidge: a biography of america's 30th president." ken rogoff, whom i mentioned, is a professor of economics at harvard university, and chrystia freeland is the editor of thompson reuters digital and author of "plutocrats." become back to both of you. ken, the piece i mentioned, you and carmen rinehart wrote almost a political piece about how the u.s. was doing. you said, look, compared with other big financial crises that meet the recessions, we're doing pretty well. fair? >> yeah. that's a fair characterization of what they said and what we said. i mean, it's fair game to say we can do better. we have a plan where the economy's going to grow better. but it you're going to evaluate what happened, was it a bad recovery, was it a good recovery, i think you have to compare it to deep financial crisis. this was not a plain vanilla recession. you have to compare it to deep financial crises we've had in this country which don't happen very oft